The Worst Apple Products of All Time 469
An anonymous reader writes "While Apple is frequently referred to as a leader in consumer electronic product design, the history of the company is filled with examples of poor design and questionable product strategies. This list of Apple's worst ever products includes some interesting trivia, including Apple's overpriced eWorld Internet service, their painfully bad attempt at a 'value' computer (the Performa), the much-loathed 'hockey puck' mouse, and the Apple Pippin gaming platform. The article also includes the infamous Apple III, which overheated so badly that it prompted one of the strangest repair techniques ever: 'Users were advised to pick the computer up a few inches off the ground and then drop it, hopefully jostling the chips back into position.'"
The List (Score:5, Informative)
9 Pippin
8 iPod Hi-Fi
7 Power PC
6 Mac OS9
5 eWorld
4 Performa line
3 "Hockey Puck" mouse
2 20th Anniversary Mac
1 Apple III
Honourable Mentions: Color Classic and the Mac Portable
Re:The List (Score:5, Interesting)
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Huh. My first computer was a recycled Apple III and I had a lot of fun with it. Never overheated once, although it wasn't until after several years I got curious and popped off the case, and discovered a second memory module which had been rattling around loose all the time I had owned it. And nothing says technology like a 5MB hard drive.
I believe one of Apple's biggest failures was dumping that Apple line. They never made the Apple IV and moved the resources into the Mac. Granted, the Mac was good, but I still liked the "openness" of the Apple I's, II's and III's. You could open the case and put whatever you wanted into them. They were very powerful machines for their day and could have been a worthy competitor to all the "IBM clones" that came out shortly afterward.
Unfortunately, they dumped it to keep it from competing with the new L
Re:The List (Score:5, Insightful)
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Except that Quicktime Player 1-3 and Quicktime Player X are excellent programs. I would agree with you for everything between Quicktime Player 4 and Quicktime Player 7.
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Re:The List (Score:4, Informative)
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Even if you do install Perian there will be formats that Quicktime doesn't play.
VLC is still better than an enhanced version of Quicktime. (Same goes for Plex)
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Perian pretty much covers everything VLC covers, the only one I know to be missing is flac, and that's easily added with another plugin.
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You should try using Quicktime on OS X instead of on Windows, just like iTunes and Safari it is a lot better on OS X than it is on Windows.
/Mikael
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Re:The List (Score:5, Informative)
Beaten only by iTunes, also strangely not on the list.
I don't care how cool iPods are, or how well the iTunes store works, the software is horrible on Windows.
Re:The List (Score:5, Informative)
An understatement, to say the least. iTunes feature creep has made it a massive piece of bloatware- Bonjour, QuickTime, Mobile Device Service, iPodhelper, etc... not to mention the main applicaiton.
The number of ways in which iTunes can break, just giving a cryptic error code is pretty pathetic.
Good UI shouldn't be awkward. Granted, for the amount shoved into iTunes, very few functions are completely broken interface-wise.
There are much better alternatives, trust me.
I know you were talking to the OP, but I can't give you the latter. Foobar2k and numerous other players have full iPod support, are much less bloated, and actually write tags back to music instead of a database (so you can switch audio applications easily). I would have to give you the latter since Apple's move to lossless DRM free music.
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What's wrong with it on OS X?
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Re:The List (Score:5, Insightful)
No mention of the latest generation ipod shuffle? The one where they figured control buttons would "clutter up" the design, so instead you have to buy special, expensive apple earbuds/headphones that are all cluttered up with inline controls and only cost ten times the cost of normal headphones? So the shuffle plus a pair of "special" headphones costs more than a nano?
I'd buy a shuffle in an instant, if it had volume up / volume down / play-pause buttons on the device.
I know adapter cables are sold, and I guess I could duct tape / hot glue gun the adapter onto the shuffle, to make an almost usable "exercise ipod". But having to pay the "apple tax" and then whip out the duct tape and hot glue gun to make it usable is just going too far.
Note I'm not an apple hater, I enjoy by nano for exercise listening and my ipod touch for PDA and video use, but the shuffle is just a design disaster.
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I initially ripped on the controls on the ear phone cable until I started using them with my iPhone. Now I think about how stupid it is to have to pull the device out of my pocket or go searching around on my waistband just to skip a song or adjust the volume. For example, last time I was snowboarding I wanted to adjust the song. Instead of having to go digging through my jacket I was able to just change it from the ear buds. That also alleviated the need to pull the device out in the cold air and have
Re:The List (Score:5, Interesting)
As someone who has been using Macs since around 1990 I disagree with quite a number of points on this list. First of all, the worst Apple product ever is without any doubt the Performa 5200 [lowendmac.com], but not the whole performa line. I've owned several performas that were very good and compact machines. Regarding the 5200, it is true that just about everything about this machine was wrong: its weight, its design, the built-in monitor, the speed (Powermac, but slower than most 68k Macs). The next point: OS 9 was an absolutely great OS and IMHO only OS 6 was better at its time. At least, unlike OS X, OS 9 is able to remember window sizes and positions. As for the "honorable mention" color classic, this still is a great machine. I once had one and have always regretted that I had sold it. It was completely silent and with a few modifications would be quite suitable for text processing today.
Moreover, given that the author of this article claims that Power PC (especially the B/W Macs) were a failure, I doubt whether he has ever owned a Mac at all. I bought a b/w Power PC Mac just when it came out, it absolutely rocked, and was usable for around 10 years. Generally speaking, the built quality of Power PC Macs was much better (except for the Performa 5200) than today's Macs. (To be fair, the b/w Mac keyboard really sucked.) In fact, the built quality of Macs has declined constantly since the Mac Plus (I have one standing on my shelf, it still boots without problems) and is worse than ever now with the exception of that of the overprized Mac Pro.
To cut a long story short, some of the items in the list are fairly incomprehensible and I suspect the author of the article has never owned or used them.
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I disagree with OS9. While it certainly was the best of the original MacOSes, which one would hope being the latest generation, it wasn't a good OS overall given when it was released.
The time had long passed since the whole "cooperative multitasking, no memory protection, static memory allocation," thing was a good idea in OSes. It was more than past time to move on. MS was in full swing doing that. Windows NT, released in 1993, went full on with features like that you should have in a modern OS. Windows 95
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Gotta agree with you there.But the PowerPC chips kept the Mac alive longer than a switch to any other processor at the time; they were close enough to the Motorola 680x0 line that the OS could be ported with decent emulation to run older binaries. It was only near the end, when Motorola and IBM lost interest in going head to head with intel that Apple decided to switch again.
I think the Performa got singled out as a line despite there being gems in the mix due to how terrible it was for the stores to sell.
Re:The List (Score:5, Informative)
The author's main complaint on the PowerPC was that it was not the ubiquitous Intel... I hardly think that makes it a mistake by Apple. The change to the Intel architecture does seem to have been a good one, but that doesn't make the long time support of the PowerPC was a bad one.
In fact, if Apple would have switched from the 68K architecture to an available Intel architecture at the time, it would have been crippling. There would not have been enough horsepower to support classic emulation. Until the MMX, the Intel architecture's pipelining was just not efficient enough and even then it was marginal. So in terms of performance, the PowerPC architecture was several years ahead of the Intel architecture.
The author's comment about the PowerPC power consumption is mystifying. Compared to the Intel offereings at the time, it was best in class.
Mac Clone (Score:2)
And? (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure, Apple's had some really bad products over time - but what do you expect from a company that big which survived that long?
And - how many open source projects died, never making it...
Apple, like any other company, doesn't always just launch brilliant products - but, at least, they're not afraid to try new things and see how they pan out...
Overall I think it's good that the DO dare making something entirely new; and more often than not fail with their products. Sometimes they even failed commercially, while still making a product people still care about (e.g. Newton).
For myself, I know many people are critical of the iPad, on the other hand, I think I will still buy one - it looks like a cool ebook reader - whether it has multi-tasking or not.
not sure the eWorld diagnosis is quite right (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think eWorld failed because of its now-ludicrous-sounding pricing model. At the time (early/mid-90s), it was the norm for online services to have monthly fees that gave only a few free hours per month, and then cost significant amounts per hour after that. In the early 90s, AOL gave 2 free hours for $7.95/month and $6/hour thereafter, and was wildly successful, so eWorld's $8.95/mo for 2 free hours and $5/hr day, $8/hr nights thereafter doesn't seem like it was so far out of line as to kill it.
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Re:not sure the eWorld diagnosis is quite right (Score:4, Interesting)
No they have a good point about PPC (Score:2)
Apple had to switch off the 68k, Motorola was basically putting it out to pasture. Apple was never a very big customer of theirs, so it wasn't enough to keep it alive. Crappy situation, but it had to happen. Now at that point they had two major choices:
1) Go with x86. That was the industry standard for personal computers, of course. Intel dumped tons of money in to development to make them the biggest, baddest, most powerful computer chips you could get, and it worked. They were, and are, fast as hell. Also
Re:No they have a good point about PPC (Score:4, Informative)
Except that your memories and mine differ. At that time, Intel processors weren't speed demons, and the PPC ran much faster. This was because Intel was seriously limited by backward compatibility, and the PPC was a new RISC chip. At that time, if you wanted raw CPU speed in a consumer desktop (which was less useful than lots of people seemed to think), the Mac was the correct choice.
Later on, Intel came up with ways to efficiently process a truly arcane instruction set, and CPU performance vs. memory bandwidth vs. increasing use of cache changed the balance of RISC vs. CISC desirability, and IBM and Motorola wouldn't continue to produce good PPC laptop chips, and Apple changed again.
Re:No they have a good point about PPC (Score:5, Informative)
This is complete bullshit. While the Pentiums were introduced in 1993 they weren't actually available in volume until early 1994 which was about the same time the PowerMacs were released and available. PowerPC native applications (especially media/graphics ones) had a real-world advantage over their Windows/DOS counterparts since they could make use of the FPU on the PowerPC chips where on PCs couldn't rely on an FP coprocessor being available. It was a while after the Pentium came out that people shipping applications that depended on its FPU. PowerPC machines were actually available to customers and often performed at least a little better than Pentium based machines of the time. The PowerMac 8100 was a beast of a machine that shipped before a 100MHz Pentium part was ever available to people.
The 68k emulation had nothing to do with "porting their OS properly" but everything to do with allocation of resources. The fast 68k emulation allowed Apple to use large amounts of code that was already written and working rather than throw it all out. Reimplementing a significant portion of the OS would have been extremely expensive and time consuming. This is even more ridiculous when you consider that the emulated code could run as fast or faster than it did on 68k chips. It also allowed customers to have a viable upgrade path. You could buy a new PowerMac and your old 68k applications would continue to work.
PowerPC didn't start to have problems until the G4/G5 era when performance gains were relatively small with each iteration and Intel was locked in a performance battle with AMD. The first G3s were extremely fast and handily beat the Pentium IIs of the time in a number of areas. Once AMD bought the IP for the Alpha and started work on the Athlons Intel wasn't really pushing performance boundaries. Motorola easily kept pace with Intel and the two kept leap-frogging one another in performance. The Athlon changed that dynamic and Intel went ape shit with clock speeds and performance and largely left Motorola in the dust.
To suggest the PowerPC was a failure because Intel eventually made chips that were way faster is to ignore or simply be ignorant of a lot of history. The Pentium line suffered a good deal from Intel's hubris while Motorola and IBM were very interested in making high performance chips.
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I agree about PowerPC - but as for MacOS, I'd put the entirety of classic MacOS in there. Before they ditched it for Next, even in its day it was a poor OS (e.g., couldn't even multitask - something that Apple has seemed to enjoy doing again, with the Iphones...). This was especially true by the time it got to MacOS 9.
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May depend on the specific time and area. I wasn't on the Internet at the start of the 90s, but by 1995 when I did get on, it was a flat rate for access. AOL may have still been doing hourly then, I don't know, but there were plenty of small ISPs that did flat rates.
Also, as they noted, it was designed to push hardware sales and was Mac only. That is a pretty major problem.
All of thier mice suck (Score:5, Interesting)
Love their products in general. MacPro and MacBook user myself but I hate their mice and their keyboards. They both have always sucked.
The Lisa sucked big time. As did Newton but ... they paved the way for future products some by Apple some not that were quite successful.
No guts no glory. They at least stick their neck out there and try things. Sometimes it does not always work.
Re:All of thier mice suck (Score:4, Insightful)
Love their products in general. MacPro and MacBook user myself but I hate their mice and their keyboards. They both have always sucked
This is true.
Missing item from the "worst" list is every Apple UK keyboard ever, which is just a US keyboard with the (#) key replaced by a (£) key, leaving all sorts of punctuation keys in the US positions. Fail.
I think the mouse problem is that you really need to go out and choose a mouse that fits your hand - Apple are constrained to (a) only having one or two models (b) making it one-size-fits-all and ambidextrous and (c) being obliged to make something "different" and "designer-y". Fortunately, for ages now, any PC USB mouse has worked fine, including multiple buttons and scroll wheels.
Re:All of thier mice suck (Score:5, Interesting)
I agree totally that their mice suck, but I adore their keyboards. To offset the mouse bit too – their track pads are by far the best in the business.
I think that's the point (Score:4, Insightful)
The article is just trying to point out that along with great successes, they have great failures too. The press as of late has been rather over the top fanboyish with Apple, hailing everything they do as amazing and generally projecting them as a company that makes bold decisions that are never wrong. This article seemed like a counterpoint to that. Showing that along with their successes, that everyone has heard about, there are plenty of failures, which many people have not. That will be true for any company, but in particular for companies that try something new.
I think it is a good reminder over all, given the massive over-hype that surrounded the iPad launch. Much of the tech press had worked themselves in to a frenzy and had decided it was going to be the greatest thing ever, without knowing anything about it. This has then been followed by a good bit of letdown. They seemed to have the idea that everything Apple produces is an amazing winner of a product. I think it is a useful reminder to say that no, Apple has produced some real bombs in the past. They are a company composed of people like any other and people make mistakes. They WILL fuck up sometimes.
I could add a few more recent products to that list, the cube being one, and Apple TV looking like another.
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I fully agree. The fallacy in the press, and my users here, seems to be "The Ipod was successful, therefore anything else from them will be".
The fact that the Mac has always been a niche product, and the Iphone is a niche product, is ignored. Indeed, the press hype it up as if the Iphone was as successful as the Ipod!
The annoying thing is, these people aren't even consistent. By their logic, since Windows is massively successful, we should all be talking about Microsoft's Zune as if it's going to be the nex
Mobile Me? (Score:3, Interesting)
EXCEPT FOR MOBILE ME!
It's f***ing DOG-DIRT! Whether it's sync issues or the server dying, or e-mails vanishing into thin air; there's always SOMETHING going wrong with the goddamn thing.
And I keep holding on thinking, "well they're bound to get it right sooner or later", but it's later and later and later, and still no sign of it ever being fixed. Drives me batty.
Laptops (Score:5, Interesting)
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No G4 Cube? (Score:3, Interesting)
At least Apple learns from it's mistakes. they finally found a home for the cube/box computer as the Mac Mini and a lot of people like it. and if you look at almost everything Steve Jobs has built over the years starting from the 1980's, it's like he's making the same computer over and over again. everything in one unit except for the keyboard and mouse
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And the market seems to like it. Outside of enthusiasts in the PC market, most people will buy a box and never think about upgrading it until it's time to buy a new one. And in the long run, that doesn't actually cost any more than buying a grey box and upgrading individual components, either.
But in a market which is increasingly shifting towards laptops and all-in-one computers, perhaps the idea of building a computer that has everything you need in a single portable box is actually a good one? I know that
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PC vendors were making machines in book and cube form before Apple was. There was nothing particularly innovative or daring about either of those ideas.
Apple dramatically improved it's marketing. That's been the most significant recent change.
Geomodem (Score:5, Informative)
A friend of mine who's a diehard fan... (Score:2)
At the time he had them, "they were the greatest thing ever".
Ask him about them now and he'll tell you they were all crap, with the exception of the PowerPC. He still swears by that (which I really don't understand).
Point being, with technology being what it is and constantly advancing, doesn't everything eventually become crap?
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Point being, with technology being what it is and constantly advancing, doesn't everything eventually become crap?
Not in my opinion. I still consider the Sega Mega Drive (Genesis to you Americans) as one of the best consoles of all time. By todays standards it outdated and had a terrible controller, sure, but I certainly wouldn't call it crap. Now compare that to the Sega Mega CD which was pretty much crap all round. Both old, both consoles, not equally crap.
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If you look back, the Power chips are RISC basic processors as opposed to CISC on the Intels. Throughout the 1990's, the PPC's were superior to vastly superior for the graphics and and audio worlds. The last time I knew anything, submarines used PPC chips for sonar analysis (not Apples, made by somebody else to custom specs) for that reason.
Although things began to change in the early 2000's. For one, companies like Newtek began optimizing their renderers for x86 and it lead to the Intel chips to become
Round of applause needed ... (Score:5, Insightful)
no comparison (Score:2)
At least they didn't invent BOB.
AOL came from eWorld (Score:3, Informative)
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Not Applie Link, QuantumLink. Apple Link was just QuantumLink's name for their Apple oriented service, since QuantumLinux was C64 only.
Not all the items listed were failures.. (Score:5, Informative)
Disclaimer:
- i did RTFA (it happens!)
- i know Apple history
- i'm not Apple fan and don't own any Apple product (anymore) actually
Anyways..
PowerPC:
PowerPC was not a failure. PowerPC's were sold by IBM in their POWER architectures and had quite a bit of success there as well. They were quick, worked well, and they allowed the transition for Apple. If apple went x86 back then, there might have been no apple today. The only "failure" would have been the G5, or in fact, the lack of G6.
Undelivered promises of updates, for 2 years, and Apple had to switch to Intel.
MacOS 9:
TFA is confusing MacOS 8 with Copland (MacOS 8 original codename).
Copland was from-scratch operating system, with true preemptive multitasking and most of the things we're used to today.
It took ages and never got completed (in fact, the failure here, was Copland).
Apple released instead MacOS 8 and subsequent updates with partial features of Copland, but no rewrite. MacOS 9 was the last of the serie, nothing more, nothing less (MacOS 9.2.2). On top of that, it is the only MacOS that could run natively inside OSX. MacOS classic pionnered todays GUI.
20th anniversary Mac:
exclusive, high priced item, for collectors.. that the author has mistaken for a consumer level product. don't really need to say more. (actually ill quote: "the issue here is not the product but that it was released during a financial crisis" then "i know the financial crisis was not related to the 20th mac".. yeah well keep on contradicting yourself just to add 1 product to the list")
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exclusive, high priced item, for collectors.. that the author has mistaken for a consumer level product
But wait ... I thought that was all Apple products?
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I'm not sure whether the G6 would have fixed those problems but Apple couldn't afford to wait: Their laptops were performance-starved and the G6 would probably have made them
screens (Score:4, Funny)
It's funny to read this on an iMac.
Departmentalised (Score:2)
from the performa-was-truly-a-dog dept.
In my country, the performa is a condom. It's also marginally (marginally!) preferable to a nasty disease
Strange Criticism of Built In Monitors (Score:2)
I am not sure how they came up with their criticsm of the Color classic being an indictment of the idea of the built in monitor.
"It could be argued that this system forced Apple to rethink building screens into systems. Sue it looks very good but it increases the overall cost of the system and limits users to a particular view. Built-in screens made sense at the start of the computing age but they have thankfully gone the way of the dinosaurs"
So I am wondering if anyone knows if the Australian Apple market
Missing Option (Score:4, Informative)
The Lisa
They forgot to mention... (Score:2)
... Every single mouse ever produced by Apple. Ever!
C'mon Steve, get over your button-o-phobia already!
TWO is the right number for buttons a mouse. Two buttons, one on each side of the mouse, with definite clicky tactile feedback.
Not one big clicky button in the middle (with no right click).
Not some vague number of buttons with zero tactile feedback and random results if a stray finger is slightly touching the mouse somewhere else.
TWO! BUTTONS! THAT CLICK!
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I disagree, 5 main buttons is what you want for a mouse. Middle click is essential and back/forward buttons are very useful.
Bohr said it best (Score:2)
-Niels Bohr
Here's my summary for the article (Score:2)
"Everything Apple does is over-priced. A the mark of a great Apple failure is being both over-priced and under-powered."
That's pretty much what they had to say about every product listed.
I used to love Apple II series computers. They were the tinker and learning machines of the day. People pushed them to all sorts of uncharted limits. Macs were too expensive to hack on so most people who owned Mac paid so much for them that they were afraid to hack on them. (Yeah, I know there were still some hacks and
2009 mac pro should be on the list as it has (Score:2)
2009 mac pro should be on the list as it has
* High price for it's hardware come on $2500 for 3gb of ram and poor video card NVIDIA GeForce GT 120 512MB. The last on started at $2200 and the old g5 was at $2000.
* High priced video card upgrade add $200 for a ATI Radeon HD 4870 512MB makeing it's real cost $350 (200+150 base cost of gt120)
* NO SLI or crossfire in osx as well.
* Does not work in osx with non efi / apple video cards.
* reused the old g5 case with little change.
Built-in screens gone the way of the dinosaurs?? (Score:2)
Color Classic: It could be argued that this system forced Apple to rethink building screens into systems. Sure it looks very good but it increases the overall cost of the system and limits users to a particular view. Built-in screens made sense at the start of the computing age but they have thankfully gone the way of the dinosaurs.
Did the author forget about the iMac?
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I love Imac.
Hated the the key-board and mouse. They gave me carpel.
I use a 2 button mouse, and a pc-keyboard.
They work fine.
I don't mind paying extra for something that takes little to maintain.
I just love the fact that all of my 'system maintenance' issues are gone.
No more hours running virus checks. Which means more time for porn
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I love Imac.
and FTFA:
Built-in screens made sense at the start of the computing age but they have thankfully gone the way of the dinosaurs.
Um...
Re:Major details wrong (Score:5, Funny)
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I love Imac.
and FTFA:
Built-in screens made sense at the start of the computing age but they have thankfully gone the way of the dinosaurs.
Um...
That is the article author's opinion. I'd dare say with the explosion of laptops it's arguable that it's not the consensus either. Built in screens are still quite commonplace and it's not just Apple doing it. In fact, more and more desktops seem to be going back to that as components get small enough to fit into the screen bezels.
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on windows 7 the iphone comes up as the iphone. you can copy and past pictures and videos off it to your computer easily. Don't really care about the SD slot since 32GB in a phone is enough for me. and i'm not one of the OCD people that has to carry their entire music collection everywhere.
and a lot of people hate Apple Mice. on my Mac Mini i like to use a Microsoft mouse and the right click works perfectly
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"32GB is enough for anyone".
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The guy was complaining that you can't use the iPhone as a USB storage device. When it comes up as "iPhone" in Windows it's coming up as a camera. You can't copy anything TO the device. Plus, it comes up on other versions of Windows also. You just have to have a driver installed for that to happen on XP.
Not to mention the fact that the iPhone 3G is perfectly capable of recording video but Apple doesn't let you. They had to save that little feature for the 3Gs.
To top it all off, we all know why there is
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Laptops without changeable batteries. Destops where it's almost impossible to change the hard drive. Etc, etc...
I'm not sure what laptops you have, but all the apple laptops I've owned had trivially easy battery swap-out. Now, I've only owned a handful of iBook, powerbook, and Macbook lines (maybe the "air" has issues with this?) but it's certainly not standard for apple to do that. iPods, sure, but not for their laptops. As for difficult to replace hard drives, the only one I can think about is iMac bub
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The non-unibody MacBook Pros take quite a bit of finicky work [ifixit.com] to replace a hard drive. It's my understanding that the Unibody designs made it significantly easier. But, that said, as a sysadmin in a primarily Mac shop I've only had to replace a MacBook Pro hard drive once and pull the drive out of a wet polycarbonate MacBook once. Strangely it's as if the quality of Apple gear is very good.
That said the Dell laptop that had its failed hard drive replaced twice in a month had a very accessible hard drive tra
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On the other hand an admin giving a tour of the lab to some people asked me how much I loved the new great mouse from Apple (that was quite a while ago).
This reminds of some jobs I had before I got into IT. I worked for two of the leaders in one particular retail field as a store manager at different times. At both of those, I was at a regional managers' meeting where someone from corporate was introducing us to some new technology they were rolling out. After they had gone over all of the features and how it worked, they picked me out to ask, "Aren't you just excited to see this new tool coming out?" (or some variation on that). My answer was "No". They we
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The camera portion of the iPhone shows up as a mass storage device.
Quite often these skewed fanboy appraisals seem to depend almost entirely
on a complete lack of understanding of the underlying technical details and
a complete lack of awareness of what's really going on underneath the covers.
The rest of the device's features are still trapped inside the walled garden.
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Re:how about all of them? (Score:5, Insightful)
And still posting their biggest profit while the economy is crumbling around us.
Seems like their marketing department is the best product they have... it's working fine indeed.
Re:how about all of them? (Score:5, Insightful)
Okay, you don't like Apple products. That's cool.
You don't understand why people like them. That shows a certain lack of empathy, but still no problem.
You then attribute it to marketing, which apparently is some mysterious force you can neither understand nor control, and stupid consumers. At that point, you've essentially said that you don't have a clue how to be commercially successful, but resent those who are. That makes you a loser, dude. Either lose the bitter attitude or get a clue.
Apple products are generally easy to use, often do certain things extremely well, and are physically attractive. Moreover, the components don't have to be ordered separately and put together by the user, which lots of people don't want to do.
Apple's marketing department has pulled some real boners, but Steve Jobs' sense of style and feel for the market are vital to Apple.
Hasn't been out long enough yet (Score:5, Insightful)
A product can only be bad if it doesn't sell. No matter how worthless the functionality is, if a product generates a lot of sales and thus a lot of profits, it is a success from a business point of view. The pet rock is a great example. No utility, whatsoever. It is just a rock with goggle eyes glued on it. However people loved the thing, tons were sold, lots of money was made. It was a success.
So, the iPad's status will be determined later. If it sells tons, then it'll be a success, even if the people who buy it just end up using it as an expensive cup holder. If it has few sales, it'll most likely be a failure since it doesn't seem to have anything that will generate any advances over all.
You have to remember that can also be a factor in success. Just because something doesn't make money doesn't mean it is a failure. An example would be the original Xbox. Overall, MS lost money on the venture. However it was a success. Why? Because it established them as a legit player in the console market, which is extremely difficult to break in to (many, many companies have tried and failed). Thus it was still a successful product in the long run.
So we can't say about the iPad till much later. Personally, I suspect it'll be a failure. I suspect it won't make much, if any, money (remember there's a lot of R&D to pay off) and it'll provide nothing to Apple overall in the long run. However, we won't be able to say for a couple years at least.
Re: (Score:2)
Depends. There are bad products that sell, maybe because of hype, or their badness surfacing later, or the sales turning into a warranty nightmare. Plus the definition of 'bad' evolves... There's good products that don't sell, too. The Palm iPod precursor comes to mind.
I'm interested in how the iPad experiment will turn out too: It seems a bunch of much more capable, but a bit less sexy, hyped and easy to use tablets will launch this year. I personally find them more enticing than the iPad (Asus T101MT, No
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A product can only be bad if it doesn't sell.
[4 more paragraphs]
Let me stop you there. Of course bad products can sell, the do all the time. You are talking rubbish.
I am betting iPad will succeed. (Score:2)
Aside from your point that it is too soon to call a flop, when it isn't even on the market, I suspect it will do quite well.
I want one for myself and it will be my first Apple anything. I don't think in terms of laptop vs iPad. The iPad is a complementary device for e-reading/couch surfing, seems absolutely the PERFECT reader for comics (.CBZ/.CBR). I haven't figured out everything I will do with it, but already enough that I plan to buy as soon as I can get one (well after a hands on to verify I really lik
The Snuggie (Score:2)
A product can only be bad if it doesn't sell. No matter how worthless the functionality is, if a product generates a lot of sales and thus a lot of profits, it is a success from a business point of view.
So you think the snuggie was not a bad idea, it's high sales are a direct result of how awful it is. The Phantom Menace was a great product according to you because of how well it did in the box office it's single day (Wensday) nearly beat Titanic's weekend gross. Bad products can be popular, just because the masses purchase a product does not indicate that product is good or lacks suckyness.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Just one googly eye, surely? Two would be clutter.
Re:What, no iPad? (Score:4, Insightful)
While the iPad seems pointless, it doesn't appear bad. The iPad predecessor the forgotten Newt would be more a much more likely candidate.
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Vaporware doesn't make the list, I guess... Can't be bad if it isn't even released.
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Re:What, no iPad? (Score:5, Insightful)
"No wireless, less space than a Nomad. Lame"
Yes, I really trust the slashdot elite to predict the success or failure of a product that *hasn't even been released yet*.
Putting it on a "worst apple products of all time" list is just ludicrously premature and speculative.
Irrelevant quote (Score:5, Informative)
* Where does this often-quoted phrase make claims that the Ipod would fail or succeed in the market? It doesn't. As an opinion of the product, it's valid no matter how successful it is (or are you saying that criticisms of Windows are stupid, because Windows is the most used OS?)
* "Slashdot" is not a single entity. There is no reason to judge squiggleslash, by a quote made by a different person, many years ago.
* Just because Apple have one successful product doesn't mean the Istale will be, and that is no argument to dismiss his opinion.
Putting it on a "worst apple products of all time" list is just ludicrously premature and speculative.
I entirely agree - just as every blimmin story we get about it is ludicrously premature and speculative. Let's get back to covering story about actually released products, not speculation about vaporware.
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If Apple had stuck with the limitations of the first generation iPod it would have been a failure. It's popular to see this quote somehow disproving Apple criticism but it does no such thing.
Imagine how the iPod could have today's dominant position while only working on a computer platform with a 10% marketshare. The first iPod was lame.
Re:What, no iPad? (Score:5, Insightful)
Nah. There are larger media players out there. They are even as much as $500 or more.
They just aren't marketed as the second coming.
It's not the device (so much). It's the mindless fanboy hype and lack of independent thought surrounding it.
Re:What, no iPad? (Score:4, Insightful)
So far the vast majority of the people claiming that the iPad is the second coming are the haters not the fanboys. I'd say most of the people doing Apple hype in general are the haters, just so they have something they can whinge about.
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Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
...and *I* bet you wake up at night and run around scaring children peeking in their windows!
What huge and wild speculation you make there? You make a wild speculation and then presume it is true and then go about drawing further conclusions as if the wild speculations were established fact.
I think you will agree that Vista was a failure before it started. Why? Because as release time got nearer, amazing new features were pulled one by one from the list of new features and it simply disappointed and unde
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I think you will agree that Vista was a failure before it started. Why? Because as release time got nearer, amazing new features were pulled one by one from the list of new features and it simply disappointed and underwhelmed the public that was craving something amazing. In the end, the public got Windows XP with DRM up the wazoo and the Aero window dressing that could barely run on new PCs. Now let's look at iPad. People wanted an Apple netbook.
There's no doubt the iPad is underwhelming, but you've over looked the obvious problem with your comparison. Vista was hyped by Microsoft and under-delivered. The iPad was hyped by the press (not Apple), and didn't meet up to lofty expectations. Apple has created a nice internet appliance that will find its niche, and eventually improve in features, price & performance with each iteration, just like the iPod has.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Perhaps. But perhaps not [slashdot.org].